Red Man Down(80)

‘Yes,’ Delaney said. ‘But how do you blackmail a man who only does favors for people? Ollie, you’re bouncing around in your seat, all of a sudden. You got an idea, or just an itch?’

‘I found Angela’s deadly file,’ Ollie said.

‘What?’

‘I asked him to look for a file we’ve called “Angela’s Deadly Research,”’ Sarah said. ‘It was just a— Marjorie told me she was looking up things, and she was afraid she might have found the item that got her killed. What did she actually call it? The file?’

‘Ed’s Life,’ Ollie said. ‘It’s got that geneology she told you about – Ed’s father and grandfather, their sorry lives and history of alcoholism. She put all his triumphs as a man in there, too – his awards and merit raises on the police force. This was just for her own satisfaction – she didn’t open this file until after he died.’

‘OK. Anything else in it?’

‘There’s a small story copied from the middle pages of The Star – old, over forty years ago – about a Boy Scout leader being dismissed from the leadership of his pack because a parent accused him of molesting her son. No charges were filed because the accused simply resigned and did not protest the charge.’

‘My God,’ Oscar said. ‘Don’t tell me it was Frank?’

‘Bingo,’ Ollie said.

‘So that’s the secret he’d pay to keep covered up,’ Delaney said. ‘Do you think it was Angela putting the arm on him?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ollie said. ‘This file was opened just a few weeks ago.’

‘That’s what she said at lunch, Oscar, remember? Said it was something to do after dinner when the game show was over and she still wasn’t ready to go to bed. It was just a flippant remark but it sounded bitter and true, a new widow discovering that evenings alone were long. She was so edgy with us that day – no wonder, now we know what she was hiding.’

‘Yes. I think she had just found out about Frank – why would she start a file about something she’d known about for years?’

‘Why would she start one and then delete it?’ Ray said.

‘Oh, well, this Angela was actually almost as computer savvy as Genius Geek, I think,’ Ollie said. ‘She retrieved this file several times. There’s another little folder in this section that contains her diary. She didn’t make daily entries, it’s more like a personal blog post – she wrote when she had something to say. And one of the things she had to say was that she kept getting a strong feeling she was being stalked. Whenever she found something in the apartment she thought was out of place, she’d delete the Ed file for a while.’

Sarah’s phone chirped and she stepped outside and answered it, to hear a secretary say that the list was on its way. While she waited for it, she called Greta Wahl and thanked her for playing an important part in the chase that was now underway.

The bell rang on the fax machine in the hall. When she saw it was for her, Sarah had a momentary feeling of ease, of sunny open spaces reaching toward an end point. She harvested the list of numbers and walked it into Delaney’s office, saying, ‘Here we go, guys, I got it.’

All the detectives leaned around her, running their eyes down the listed numbers. They didn’t know the exact time of the call they had to find.

‘There it is,’ Sarah said, pointing. ‘Just as I thought. Cecelia.’





FIFTEEN


Sarah drove the car when they went to pick her up. Oscar asked to ride in the second seat, saying he thought he could coax her into co-operating.

‘OK, if you think so,’ Delaney said, getting that look again, Oh, yeah, Oscar and the ladies. ‘Be a whole lot better for her if she does.’

‘And for us, too’ Sarah said, when they were under way. ‘Who wants to stage a fight in a beauty shop?’

‘She would never do that,’ Oscar said. ‘She’s too proud.’

They had talked to the owner of Desert Cuts, confirming the payments Cecelia had been making – a thousand a month for the last four years. ‘Another two months and she’ll own it,’ the woman said.

‘Really? The whole place for fifty thousand?’

‘The chairs, the dryers – and the business I have built up, that’s all it is. I don’t own the building – she will still have rent to pay, same as me.’ The shop owner’s name was Lois, she was from Iowa, and she had bought in to Cecelia’s story about saving her tips.

‘A hundred percent!’ she insisted. ‘Of course I believed her – why wouldn’t I?’ She had brought her asthmatic son to the desert because she had heard the dry air would be good for him – ‘The other big lie I believed! Oh!’ She mopped her face, which perspired freely when she was agitated. ‘We got here just in time for dust storms and global warming. Hell’s bells, a couple more years and this town is just gonna dry up and blow away completely!’